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CO2 Emissions Rose for the First Time in 4 Years (vice.com)
Human emissions of carbon dioxide have gone up for the first time since 2013, according to the UN's ninth annual Emissions Gap Report, meaning the world isn't on track to mitigate the worst of climate change's already disastrous effects. From the report: The report, published on Tuesday, says that while carbon emissions stayed relatively level between 2014 and 2016, carbon emissions in 2017 went up by 1.2 percent. Composed by climate scientists using the most up-to-date scientific data, the report aims to determine whether we're on track to meet the goals set by international climate agreements, such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. The "emissions gap" is the difference between how low our emissions need to be, and where they actually are. The UN report concludes that the world isn't hitting the emissions targets necessary to curb warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. While the goal is not impossible, it's unlikely to be met under current political conditions, which have rendered us unable to take significant action against climate change for more than half a century. "According to the current policy and [Nationally Determined Contributions] scenarios, global emissions are not estimated to peak by 2030, let alone by 2020," the report reads. "As the emissions gap assessment shows, this original level of ambition needs to be roughly tripled for the 2C scenario and increased around fivefold for the 1.5C scenario."
Letâ(TM)s see
1. Let CO2 increase a little longer and then scientists solve all our problems and humanity lives happily ever after
2. Stress out about it
Easy choice. This is why they give the difficult decisions to scientists with degrees (degrees! See what I did there? Hahahahahaha)
Reversing the Obama fuel economy standards has greatly accelerated the submerging of Mar-a-lago!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Bananas growing in New Jersey! Mass Hysteria!
According to Hansen
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
Still waiting for those 50 million climate refugees predicted by the UN
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
Or how are things on the West Side of Manhattan these days ?
https://www.salon.com/2001/10/...
Then again snow is supposed to be a thing of the past as well
http://www.climatedepot.com/20...
Carbon reduction is hard, there are often a lot of steps which are counter intuitive
For example it takes less carbon to ship Apple from China to California then it does from New York to California. Mainly because cargo ships use less fuel per ton of goods then shipping via semi-truck.
Then we have the Automobile guilt. While your home (in most climates) is polluting more then your car.
To fix this solution we need real leadership who is willing to realize the problem is more then just solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. It is taking a look at all our energy usage finding wastes and inefficiencies. Making sure businesses are playing by the same sets of rules globally just so we don't offset our emissions to an other country, because they will undercut our price.
Such issues is too complex for average Joe Sixpack to deal with, or even an Latte drinking hipster. It will require a global change with everyone playing by the same rules, and firm penalties for anyone who wants to cheat the system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
People who are ignorant of science are not "skeptics", they are "ignoramuses"
Flat Earthers, for instance, are not skeptical, They are willingly uninformed.
Stop breathing, don't try to lose weight, don't stay in shape, or better yet just die. That's the whole goal of this in the long run, isn't it? We have too many people on the planet going after too few resources which means depletion of eco-systems. The planet is fine, the people are fucked at 7 Billion+, we can't sustain that.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
You cannot offer science, veritas, proof to denialists. They won't accept it, the reason will be invented on the spot, and they'll continue along their denialist low-information trajectory until they die toothless and broken, unconvinced.
In fact, unconvinceable - and we need to stop trying to convince the morons. We need to ignore them for the sake of life on Earth as we know it, and get back to science and scholastic veritas.
Denialists will always be there, chortling and being pests of no value. We need to cut them right out of the argument at the first lie they begin with.
Exactly, those that deny the fact that we need nuclear power expansion in the mix to make real progress are a huge problem. We see it in our history, and in real world examples, and we see it now as all those wind and solar farms aren't making a dent. Yet the denials continue.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Working of Error
Look at that link, do you see any change in slope 2013-2016?
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_full_record.png
And emissions of CO2 stalled? Hmmm?
Cowardly closings of nuclear power plants post-Fukushima are finally hitting home? Less nuclear = more fossil fool energy. Never mind that, despite a few high-profile accidents, commercial nuclear power is a lot safer than any other mode of electricity production.
Look, nobody wants to tell you guys, but most of the US emissions are from two sources:
1. Drilling and extraction of fossil fuels from US National Parks (25 percent of US emissions)
2. Inefficient Southern States. Most of which still use expensive fossil fuels. Wind and solar are both cheaper. yes, cheaper than natural gas.
Look at the actual report, you'll see Texas and the West are already meeting and exceeding the Paris Accord goals. It's not us. It's you.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
0.03 degrees here, 0.03 degrees there, adds up to whole degrees if multiple measures are taken. One person dumping lead paint on the ground isn't a major problem, everyone doing it makes a Superfund site.
According to the chart on page 9 the US is doing pretty well.
Yet somehow China which has 27% of global emissions and went up 17% is marked as "on track to meet the targets under current policies".
Those targets must not be very serious
That's not a problem, that might be a solution to the problem.
This report just means that the global economy is finally recovering in a decent manner. So it's actually good news.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
99% of scientists don't agree on man made climate change!
It is not even the pathetic fake statistic of 97%.
That Cook paper has been thoroughly discredited.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/03/science-or-science-fiction-97-climate-consensus-crumbles-in-new-survey/
And many more discrediting studies are showing the same.
Science is never done by consensus. It is not a popularity contest.
One small finding can over turn an entire field, Wegner and continental drift for example.
Yes, my 8 year plus 4 years of post-doc work allowed me to join a church.
Idiot.
But it IS a political issue, as soon as we start talking about legislation mandating behaviors!
The true "denialists" aren't that relevant, if the science is solid enough to prove them wrong. You'll never get everyone to accept almost anything. We still have a Flat Earth Society and a number of people refuse to accept the theory of evolution.
What DOES matter is what you propose to do about the issue. If you want to research machines that could efficiently extract excess CO2 from the air? That's VERY different than trying to implement "carbon taxes" or imposing Federal regulations demanding a halt to the use of a particular fossil fuel (like coal).
Just because researchers come to a consensus that the planet's climate is slowly increasing in temperature doesn't mean they need to become political - advocating taxation and regulation. If our technological advances are what got us into this mess, they can get us back out too. People will always go with the options that cost them the least money, and give them the most benefit. Improve cleaner energy alternatives so they're cheaper and better, and people will gladly stop burning oil, natural gas and coal!
" While the goal is not impossible, it's unlikely to be met under current political conditions, which have rendered us unable to take significant action against climate change for more than half a century."
That sounds very sad....but let's be clear on this.
"Current political conditions" sounds an awful like "Those fucking stupid Republicans and Trump won't go along with the plan!" ...when in reality the facts or the "current political conditions" and "political conditions for the last half century" are/have been:
- Kyoto ENTIRELY failed to address/regulate China or India (for...reasons).
- the world's largest emitter is CHINA - double that of the US* - and it is growing the fastest as well. China's increase over the last decade alone was 60% of the world's increase.
- the US has - despite disregarding International Kum-Bay-Yah handholding promise-sessions - decreased it's CO2 emissions. In fact the US leads other countries (it's just behind the EU collectively) in reductions. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-leads-all-countries-in-reducing-carbon-emissions/#4a376eb73535)
- the countries that HAVE signed such agreements are largely failing to reach the goals they promise, even though the Paris agreement had the most modest targets ever.
Essentially, the "political conditions" are that the Climate Agreements are do-nothing SJW virtue-signaling, while the country pointed at as an international pariah is ACTUALLY improving significantly. The worst emitter in the world is now hailed as "leading the fight against climate change!"
cf The Emperor's New Clothes, I guess?
*don't give me "but...but...per capita emissions are lower in China!" First, it's an absolute problem, not a per capita problem. We don't talk about per capita CO2 levels. Per capita is West-hating ecomarxist apologists' desperate to find a way to blame the US for everything. If you want to talk about per capita CO2 output, then let's compare per capita PRODUCTIVITY (PPP) vs per capita CO2 production. Hint: China's an even-worse culprit in that context.
-Styopa
Unfortunately the climate change deniers are fed their diet of bullshit by a bunch of extremely wealthy people who stand to gain financially from continuing on the current course. (In the short term anyway).
These same wealthy people also control much of the US political system, so what they want, they get.
We should treat them with the contempt they deserve, but they have power and are not afraid to use it.
What do you teach? :-/
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
No problem. Trump is going to make the environment great again. He said so.
Like it or not, climate change will force you to make those changes sooner or later. The American Dream says we should do them now so that our children and grandchildren will have better lives.
Do you have children, or plan to?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Enjoy driving your pickup truck that handles like the Edmund Fitzgerald in a storm, while I zip around you in my Honda Civic. Corolla, or Miata.
Skepticism would be asking questions and then listening to the answers.
But it IS a political issue, as soon as we start talking about legislation mandating behaviors!
Whether the science is correct is not a political issue. The facts are the way they are regardless of your political viewpoint.
What we chose to do about it (or even, whether we should chose to do anything about it) is a political issue. But that is completely different from the science question.
When I hear people denying the validity of the science, and when you question them they say the science is wrong because they don't agree politically with some of the proposed solutions: this is denialism. (You can tell these people because within about one minute of opening their mouth they start talking about Al Gore. Deniers are obsessed with Al Gore.) The validity of the science doesn't depend on whether your political ideology is able to solve problems or not.
As I'm involved in a major international effort to start measuring the global Carbon cycle systematically I was somewhat surprised about the claim about emissions in the article. So, I checked the publication. You are spot on: The major CO2 driver in this study is a simple fixed fraction of GDP. It appears that, even if we turned entirely to fusion energy, this report would claim an increase in CO2 emission when the economy picks up.
You're confusing rate of change emission with rate of emission, but not understanding derivatives is par for the course for anonymous cowards.
Problems that people have to solve together are hard.
Energy intensity is not a constant.
By coincidence, I own a Honda Civic Hybrid, Prius Plug in Hybrid, and a Miata. Toyota's are the most reliable cars made, Honda is the second most reliable car made. Mazdas are, well, more reliable than Subarus.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Show me the CRU data used in the IPCC reports, unaltered, along with the methods they used to alter the data and reasons why.
Oh, you can't? You don't like peer review? You want to hide the data and delete a few weeks before a judge forces you to release it via a FOIA request?
The science IS political when you literally break the law to prevent peer review, and then claim since you weren't charged you did nothing wrong (which just shows the prosecutors are politically corrupt as well).
Not a single person can answer why the CRU did this in a way that doesn't make them sound like a partisan idiot shill.
It may be real, it may not, but the AGWers have lied so frequently and hidden data from peer review I pretty much assume they always lie at this point.
People will always go with the options that cost them the least money, and give them the most benefit. Improve cleaner energy alternatives so they're cheaper and better, and people will gladly stop burning oil, natural gas and coal!
It's not always obvious and many if not most people will go with what is cheapest now rather than what's cheapest in the long term.
My lights are out, I can (or could before gov't intervention) get a whole box of incandescent bulbs that use 4-8x more electricity than modern options and only last about a year for like $8.
Or I could buy a single LED bulb for $10 that uses 1/8th the electric and will last 5+ years.
My house is cold, electric resistive heating equipment is cheap to buy.
Costs roughly 4x more to run than NG or heat pump but it's cheaper to get and doesn't have any additional monthly fees.
How can that be addressed?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Well, I'm all for helping out, if it doesn't inconvenience me or alter my lifestyle in any major way.
But I am a bit older these days, and I'm also weighing how much longer I'll live before the earth gets bad.....I doubt it will get that bad before I'm done with it.
I don't have any kids that I know of.....and God no I'd not like to have them going forward. I enjoy my disposable income, and freedom to come and go and do as I please for the most part.
I'm kinda going with Jim Morrison on this run through life:
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
We need to ignore them for the sake of life on Earth as we know it, and get back to science and scholastic veritas.
It's difficult to ignore people that we keep electing to office.
Denialists will always be there, chortling and being pests of no value.
I guess if things get really bad the denialists might be exiled or killed. Too late to matter by that point, but at least we can feel superior while we starve to death.
We need to cut them right out of the argument at the first lie they begin with.
I've given up debating them. The debate is over, and they failed to convince me. Even if they don't realize or accept that they lost, I've moved on.
I understand some denialists believe they are simply being skeptics. But at the same time so much information has been presented and so many models detailed yet so few self-described skeptics are using those models or presenting counter models. The simulations are correct to a point, in that we can predict short terms weather very accurately and even short term trends. The debate in the scientific community is where the models go past a certain point when things start to go off the rails, it's a debate about what numbers to plug into the simulation and how bad things will get and how soon things will happen.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You're dropping the ball at the apex of the curve. And indeed if you move 1 inch over, you're still at the apex relative to the force of gravity. Because the center of mass is described as a point, and the force to the center does not form parallel lines. You can consider it perpendicular to the tangent of the surface of a sphere.
If you don't believe in gravity, or in mass. Then sure you can claim whatever you'd like. We'll think you're a crackpot, and many of your "students" probably make jokes about their one teacher that makes wild claims. Filtering and censoring evidence in order to "prove" your point to students is disingenuous, and nobody should be expected to take you seriously.
I don't really see the harm in your hobby as a polemist. It makes you a more colorful character.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I've never met a flatard that only held a single wacky idea. They're always excited to share a whole set of weird ideas with anyone who'd listen. The most entertaining people are the ones where a flat Earth is their least weird idea.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Also, those railroads would have much better regulated emissions and worker safety rules. One of the dirty secrets of the shipping industry from China is that they lose a few ships a month (and their crew). It's cheaper to let the ships go down than the build ships that won't sink. And yes, we can build ships that don't sink nowadays.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Why the hell SHOULDNT we give you a per capita figure? hmm?.
Because Americans have a natural right to personally pollute more than others? Head buried in the sand much?
Perhaps we should therefore hold america up the the emission levels of say New Zealand, because the problem is absolute, right?
Lets see: 2014 figures (easily on hand)
USA: 6673Mt, New Zealand: 75Mt
I hope you are ready to drop your use by 90 times...
Hell, why not Fiji? 2.7Mt,
I doubt you can have cooking fires by now, but hey, its an ABSOLUTE problem, so I'm sure you wont mind.
Better not look at Nauru, or you will all have to stop breathing I suspect.
You just keep thinking that, as china sails past you economically, socially, and at the rate they are researching modern nuclear, environmentally..
Denial is such a wondering thing, isnt it.
Science will never be enough to prove them wrong. It can't shake their minds about religion being BS, it's the same "faith over facts" when it comes to global warming.
Seriously? Why the hell should people in Canada be able to release nearly 21 tons of GHG/person while you criticize India at 2.28 or China at 8. I live in Ottawa Canada, we might have the worst urban planning anywhere. The city almost entirely white collar jobs, young and educated. 95% the new housing in the last 20 years has been sprawling urban car dependent neighbourhoods. You have to have a car here. Half my neighbours have never walked to a store, hair cut or recreational facility in the entire time they have lived here. It's just not possible. People use their front yards for piling snow and the back yards for dogs to shit in. Kids can't walk to school because we don't have sidewalks and the snow banks and parked cars would mean walking in the middle of the road. Buses don't work because the streets aren't on a grid so there are no good places to put a stop. We have tens of thousands of office jobs in my neighbourhood and no one can walk to work. The offices are surrounded by seas of parking so wide everyone has to drive to go for lunch. It's actually terrible for our physical and mental health. Having kids in the suburbs should qualify as child abuse.
You want to fix climate change, bulldoze the suburbs with your politicians still there.
No one is skeptical about the science behind the Earth' s climate changing.
This isn't true. You see "CO isn't a pollutant, it's plant food" across the denialosphere.
People are skeptical of the completely off-the-rails scenarios that science proposes if we don't stop the warming.
If science proposes it then theres a line of reasoning to it from evidence.
Doomsday scenarios have been sold to the public since the beginning of time, and the solutions are always the same: Give the government more money and control over your life.
This is the fearmongering that fossil fuel interests are engaging in. But some things are taxed, and freedoms don't end.
Have you ever read up on the bullshit that "scientists" predicted at the first Earth day back in the 70s? 4 billion people were supposed to die from starvation by 1985.
Have you ever read up on the theory of Relativity? Scientists predicted gravitation and time dilations precise to the limits of measurement. And the predicted gravity waves have now been observed kicking off a new era in astronomy. Have you ever read up on medical science? Vaccinations? Germ theory and antibiotics? Life expectancy at birth has increased 60% in the USA in the years 1900 to 2000.
Scientists are nothing more than political mouthpieces.
Really. You don't believe in the medical advances or technological advances that have been made.
Do you remember networking before Wi-Fi?
Remember when it was Global cooling?
A misperception. The science was at best equivocal on coming global cooling.
The ozone layer?
Yes. We got rid of CFC emissions, but the ozone hole is still very extensive. It contributes to blindness and skin cancer especially in the southern hemisphere.
Overpopulation?
Yes. The world uses about 30% more resources that it produces every year. They are being depleted, and if it crashes it will get nasty.
Global warming? Anthropogenic global warming?
Yes. It's warming.
They've literally been wrong about the consequences of this shit every time.
They really haven't.
Stfu and face the facts that humanity doesn't understand shit about this world.
This shouldn't be a source of comfort. It means that there will be impacts of climate change that no one has yet realised.
Ah, the cause of so much strife in the world:
1. Describe some perfectly reasonable/believable/true observation.
2. Come up with some crazy and unsupported statement that (1) supports some claim.
3. Profit?
Hah! I'll laugh at you, stuck in LA traffic, as I go by on my motorcycle...:)
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It's a cherry-picked survey where those who were stated as 'explicitly endorse human-caused climate warming' directly refute the classification. When your data - which is surveyed papers from authors - literally comes out and says you're wrong, well - you should question the accuracy of the survey in the first place.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I agree with you. Most people are primarily concerned with what's cheapest when they need it. They're not so worried about a long-term environmental cost that's more of an abstract and may not even noticeably affect them during the rest of their lifetime.
BUT, people are also generally smart enough to know that "you get what you pay for", and will pay a bit more for a superior option,if it's still in their price range.
Government intervention is, IMO, your worst possible way to try to change behavior. Your lighting example is a great one. Yes, government started MANDATING people buy CFL's instead of traditional incandescent bulbs. So what happened? Everyone started using those ugly "squiggly" looking bulbs in their fixtures at motels, offices and homes -- and quickly discovered they were burning up and failing in anything enclosed. They also found out they're an environmental hazard if you drop and shatter one, and most took an annoyingly long time to come up to their full brightness once turned on. The overall disgust at how inferior those products were, despite their ONE good quality (using less energy) drove people to start voluntarily switching to new LED lighting technology. That interest and demand, in turn, brought costs WAY down and competition ensured the quality generally went up. Last year, I replaced every single bulb in my house with an LED version, because it was a trivial expense and gave me pleasant lighting that saves me money on my electric bills, and saves hassle changing bulbs that burn out.)
So government 0, free market demand 1.
When you start talking about home heating systems, you're getting into a problem where more efficient options are VASTLY more expensive. I'm struggling with this now myself. My house has a pair of electric heat pumps for the upstairs and downstairs floors. My winter electric bills are AWFUL. But still, replacing these with geothermal heat pumps that would stop them from using the electric heating elements (aux heat) whenever it gets too cold would cost me well over $50,000. That money pays a whole lot of utility bills ....
How can it be addressed? I think it just takes time and R&D. Have we reached the plateau where no more cost savings or improvements can be invented to HVAC systems? Nah! I have faith they'll come along. But the current solutions only save a person money if they buy them for a "forever home" they're never going to move out of, and the break-even point comes close to the point where the systems are wearing out and in need of another replacement.
US manufacturing output is rising, and yet our CO2 output is falling. China's output of both is rising.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Someone didn't read the article, with actual quotes from authors which Cook lied about. But you have a narrative and a belief to push, I get it...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Kids can't walk to school because we don't have sidewalks and the snow banks and parked cars would mean walking in the middle of the road.
Kids can't walk to school because CPS will come take them away from you if you let them go unaccompanied.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
People treating the associated costs of converting away from cheap coal and other dirty sources of energy as an inconvenience and people who don't like the inconvenience or additional expense as simply selfish.
No, no, no.
This is a matter of life and death. If you raise the price of energy, you plunge more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking can take up to 7 years off your life, but living in poverty can take 10. People in poverty get poor nutrition, little or no preventive medical care, exposure to both the elements and criminal attacks because they're sleeping on a steam grate in an alley and freezing or getting beaten up by another person in poverty that wants to steal their shoes, and so forth. It isn't just that you might have to choose to carpool in order to afford to get to work 50 miles away each day, its that some poor schmuck died today because electricity went from 12.5 cents per KwH to 25 cents per KwH and they couldn't afford that and the rent too, and so were out living on the street and got mugged by a guy with a big knife, and bled to death in minutes. Yes, that's a death from poverty, because otherwise he would have been inside his house with a locked door between himself and the guy with the knife.
I actually wonder if ANY of the proponents of the pain and suffering of "doing something" about global warming stop to calculate how many people they'll kill doing it, and whether those people they kill will exceed in number the people that would be killed by the global warming if we instead did nothing.
OBTW I saw a headline a day or 2 ago that USA carbon emissions went down again for 2017, while the rest of the world's went up. Just sayin'...
What about this claim by AC:
"4 billion people were supposed to die from starvation by 1985. "
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Being skeptical is a good thing. Asking questions and demanding proof too.
Dismissing any proof because it's not what you want to hear is not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's also true. It's a bit like junkies, there's only a few that only do one kind of hard drug, once they start with that shit they rarely limit it to just one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We'll talk again when you learned how gravity works.
Hint: "Down" is always towards the center of the planet. That's why you don't fall off in Antarctica.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nonono, you got that wrong there my friend. Churches are about believing. Science is about knowing (or wanting to, rather). That's fundamentally different.
To know something, you have to learn something. And it may even entail having to learn something else, because there is a very crucial and important step between learning and knowing that you can't simply omit: Understanding. You learn, then you understand, then you know. Sorry, but there's no shortcut from not knowing to knowing. These are the steps you have to take if you want to know something.
There is of course a cop-out: Believing. That's by some margin (and then some) easier to do and way less hassle. To believe something, no learning, no understanding and certainly no knowing is required. All you have to do is state unilaterally "I believe" and you're in.
That's why believing is so much more popular in our quick-fix, want-to-have-my-trophy-for-free world. It's easy, hassle free and most of all does not require any kind of work from you. All it takes is saying "I believe".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Possibly he's thinking of a book, rather than a body of peer reviewed scholarly literature The Population Bomb.
If that's the source, I haven't read it. According to the wiki page, it was controversial at the time, so it's not correct to suggest that it was accepted by science. And it's not correct to say it made predictions, but explored a number of possible scenarios. Certainly many of which were way off.
It has exactly as much demonstrable causation as your "OMG we are all gonna die!".
US CO2 emissions dropping. Sucks to be wrong, eh AC?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
No, I'd much rather get behind President Trump and "Make America Great Again" by creating an economy where everyone has an opportunity to get a good job and take care of themselves. The best helping hand that a person has is attached to their wrist. THEN we can use a much diminished welfare state to handle the ones that for some reason _can't_ hold a good job. But the welfare state is just shared misery - socialism is always like that - and a healthy economy is a much better approach for maximal prosperity.
The gov't never mandated the use of CFLs, they made the manufacture and sale of lower efficiency bulbs illegal and left it up to the market to fill in the gaps, even halogen bulbs are still allowed but they are expensive, and don't last as well as the incandecents did while only having a little better effeciency. 60w incandecent = 43w halogen = 13w CFL = 8.5W LED
Would we be using primarily LEDs today if the govt had not mandated they stop the sale and manufacture of low efficiency bulbs?
There is a big difference in usability between the CFLs and LEDs, CFLs are dim at startup and then warm up and aside from CCFLs (not a typo) can't stand rapidly switched installs like signs and motion switches and afaik they still don't handle dimming well.
LEDs suffer from none of those issues, neither did incandecents, LED bulbs are a very visible upgrade from CFLs.
Put a modern led and an incandecent side by side and most people can't tell the difference by the light output, with some of the newer ones you can hardly tell even by looking directly at them.
IMHO we only ended up going with CFL because LED wasn't ready at the time, in some cases CFL is still not ready as you can't readily buy higher wattage (like 300w equivilent) LEDs while you can CFLs.
Still I think we would have ended up here eventually on a cost basis but without the low efficiency bulbs ban I think it would have taken much longer.
Same sort of issue with my home heating here,
~2005ish heat pump with LP aux heat, heat pump doesn't work below about 30F which ends up being most of the winter nights here.
Just the hardware costs to replace both units would be something like $24K.
Luckily LP is about as cheap to run as a decent heat pump when bought in bulk or at least it is right now.
At work we have a unit on NG and a unit on resistive electric, the resistive electric costs about 4x more to run than the NG but again many thousands to replace.
My rough estimate was that switching both units over to a modern heat pump that works in below freezing temps would save a bit over $1K/yr so looking like a minimum of 24 years for break even assuming the install was free, switching the electric unit over to NG would save about $650/yr so like 7 year break even.
NG is cheap per therm but has year round charges that make it total out at 3/4 the cost of electric;
1 year of electric heat costs $850
1 year of NG heat and service charges costs $610
but the cost for the NG alone is just $202
Yeah i'm sure the prices will come down eventually but right now the tech is often cost prohibitive even though it's cost effective long term.
It's something you would consider for a new install or a replacement for a failed unit but isn't usually considered worth replacing a working existing unit that's already paid for.
Solar's in much the same spot but IIUC solar has gotten so cheap that the installation makes up the majority of the cost now.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
And because everyone is spread out public transit sucks and is expensive. The problem is that the developers have bought up land just outside of the current building boundaries speculating for the next round of expansion. If the city doesn't expand the developers go to the province, OMB, and will get them to expand the boundary. Or course most of the counsellors took money from the developers during the election campaign so they will be friendly to the developers.
There was a rumour that at one of the transit stations in Barrhaven there was going to be an apartment tower go up right near the station. It was a great choice because there was nothing there and no homes nearby. Instead homes and condos like I mentioned above went in. Now you won't get a tower in there for a century at least. Barrhaven doesn't have any towers for apartments or condos. Just sprawling houses.
The new condos being built have horribly inefficient air conditioning being installed on them. There are lots of things that could be done in this city to make it much better for the environment but all the mayor cares about is his train set. His obsession is going to bankrupt the city.
As I'm involved in a major international effort to start measuring the global Carbon cycle systematically I was somewhat surprised about the claim about emissions in the article. So, I checked the publication. You are spot on: The major CO2 driver in this study is a simple fixed fraction of GDP.
And this right here is why skepticism refuses to go away. This isn't science. It's not even economics. It's an incredibly stupid bad oversimplification. But since it got published, and somebody hung the "science" label on it, the general public will be bludgeoned if they don't accept it as gospel.
The United Nations Environment Programme is not a peer reviewed journal, but is that going to be mentioned anywhere? Fuck if Vice would acknowledge it. No, they quote it and generate a whole FUD article using it as the basis. There is far FAR too much of this happening since climate research was politicized in the '80s, and it's the reason why the push-back is getting more and more stiff.
It's irrelevant how good the climate science is when climate journalism is so fantastically, incredibly, absurdly, running-out-of-adverbs poor.
The problem you describe about urban sprawl affects many Canadian cities and there was in fact a term coined for it, something like sprawl paradox. And it is a paradox that I have seen studies on (but perhaps no firm conclusions). The paradox is that when asked, nearly everyone (>80%) wants more density, walkable neighborhoods and a vibrant core. Then when it comes time to actually spending their money, nearly everyone again buys a house in the suburbs. What they really want as dictated by their purchasing decisions differs from what they claim to desire.
It's not a central planning function that results in urban sprawl, it's market demand. I have a feeling that while dense living sounds great, having your own space, the practicality of it (a yard for my new kids!), and family pressures result in suburban single family homes being the big sellers.